MWC 2013: ZTE Open hands-on review

We were excited to get our hands on the phone after the disappointment of the Alcatel One Touch Fire, but what we were met with was underwhelming.

Upon picking it up, the first thought is to how cheap it feels. The body is light and flimsy and feels as if its innards aren't big enough to take up the space inside.

The 3.5-inch screen has a quite low-quality 480x320-pixel resolution and a 3.2 megapixel camera, which takes a long time to capture an image and the result being grainier than it really should be.

A paltry 256MB of RAM is backed up by a Cortex A5-based Qualcomm processor and the phone has 512MB of storage, although this can be expanded via a microSD slot.

But the main attraction is the Firefox OS, and – like the handset itself – this too was disappointing. While it hasn't been perfected yet, what we saw did not fill us with hope. The OS immediately reminded us of Android Gingerbread, and the lag (even when swiping between screens) was extreme.

It's a simple-looking OS, and anyone with Android experience will pick it up in an instant.

There is no firm release date for this phone yet, but if/when it does arrive in the UK, it will be firmly embedded in the budget handset camp.

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